Asus ROG Strix RTX 2080 Super OC Review: Premium Card with a Premium Price

The Asus ROG Strix RTX 2080 Super OC includes features like integrated fan and RGB headers and a robust heatsink and power delivery, coupled with a premium price.

Reviews
By
published
Asus ROG Strix RTX 2080 Super OC
(Image: © Asus)

Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.

The Asus ROG Strix RTX 2080 Super OC proved to be a very good card at 1440p with ultra settings, and it's capable of 4K UHD with high to ultra settings in most games. While the former ran well on any title, some games will need to drop settings from ultra for a smooth gaming experience.

The massive heatsink and triple-fan setup also proved effective and ran quietly in our tests, even with performance mode enabled and the fans always running. Using the quiet BIOS, while the fan RPM doesn’t change at load, during idle and light load operations the fans remain off yielding complete silence during menial tasks.

(Image credit: Asus)

Asus also provides some extras that will appeal to a subset of users. Most motherboards typically have enough headers for fan control, but the card offers two additional fan headers plus an RGB header. The latter works with the Asus Aura Sync software, and if you're planning on using an Asus motherboard the ROG Strix graphics card makes for a sensible addition.

Is it worth the $789 price? That's up to the person holding the credit card. From a pure performance standpoint, the answer is a clear no — of the three RTX 2080 Super cards we've looked at, all three provide nearly the same performance. However, potential buyers need to consider the additional features. At the bottom of the pricing scale, the RTX 2080 Super FE goes for $700, and sometimes you can find an RTX 2080 Super for under $700 (e.g., we've seen this MSI Ventus XC OC for as little as $680). High-end cards like the EVGA RTX 2080 Super XC Hybrid we recently reviewed have better cooling, but a reference PCB and doesn’t have any additional fan/RGB headers.

The Asus ROG Strix 2080 Super OC has one of the best heatsinks and most robust power delivery setups of competing cards making the decision more difficult. It basically matched a liquid-cooled card in performance thanks to its higher factory clock speeds, and it looks good with an attractive backplate, well-implemented RGB lighting, and manages to keep thermals quietly under control. If you can stomach the high price and it will fit in your chassis, the Asus ROG Strix RTX 2080 Super OC is a viable RTX 2080 Super option. Otherwise, there are smaller and less expensive cards to choose from.
 

MORE: Best Graphics Cards

MORE: Desktop GPU Performance Hierarchy Table

MORE: All Graphics Content

Joe Shields
Joe Shields
Motherboard Reviewer

Joe Shields is a Freelance writer for Tom’s Hardware US. He reviews motherboards.

8 Comments Comment from the forums
  • JarredWaltonGPU
    You'll notice we're moving to a new charting system, which will allow us to show more GPUs in the charts without a ton of effort. I'm quite pleased with my macro and VBA hacking in Excel that makes all of this possible. Comments or suggestions are welcome (constructive or otherwise). Distilling down tons of frametime logs into a digestible format is the end goal, and past experience suggests almost no one cared about some of the additional charts we used to provide.
    Reply
  • vinay2070
    This is not related to the graphs, but to the main landing page in general. I feel that TH website feels more 'texty' Large fonts of text with very little gaps between headlines and not enough images makes it not so pleasant to look at or read. For example I like how wccftech's site design is(though that is too much of images and less of text). A balance would be great. My preference would be between anandtech and wccftech (leaning almost towards anandtech). But then looks are totally subjective. Just sharing my thoughts.
    Reply
  • JarredWaltonGPU
    vinay2070 said:
    This is not related to the graphs, but to the main landing page in general. I feel that TH website feels more 'texty' Large fonts of text with very little gaps between headlines and not enough images makes it not so pleasant to look at or read. For example I like how wccftech's site design is(though that is too much of images and less of text). A balance would be great. My preference would be between anandtech and wccftech (leaning almost towards anandtech). But then looks are totally subjective. Just sharing my thoughts.
    Nearly everything related to presentation on the website is out of our hands -- it's controlled by Future, which has a standardized CMS for most of their sites. AnandTech is one of the exceptions -- transition to our Vanilla CMS has been indefinitely delayed. Anyway, are you saying we have too much text on our front page? The usual complaint is too many ads, which is also out of our hands.

    For articles, we try to mix in a few images and tables with the text every 3-5 paragraphs, but we do tend to get technical and sometimes just a bit long-winded. It's sort of the reputation Tom's has built of the years: go deep. Cheers!
    Reply
  • street0123
    JarredWaltonGPU said:
    Nearly everything related to presentation on the website is out of our hands -- it's controlled by Future, which has a standardized CMS for most of their sites. AnandTech is one of the exceptions -- transition to our Vanilla CMS has been indefinitely delayed. Anyway, are you saying we have too much text on our front page? The usual complaint is too many ads, which is also out of our hands.

    For articles, we try to mix in a few images and tables with the text every 3-5 paragraphs, but we do tend to get technical and sometimes just a bit long-winded. It's sort of the reputation Tom's has built of the years: go deep. Cheers!
    r
    The website is completely unreadable with that Playerunknown Battlegrounds background. Until that comes off I will stay away from your site and refer everyone to other tech review and testing websites.
    Reply
  • Phaaze88
    *sigh
    The Asus Tax strikes again...

    Out of everything Asus I've tried/seen myself, the only thing I'm impressed with is the bios menu on their motherboards.
    So popular and overrated.
    Reply
  • vinay2070
    JarredWaltonGPU said:
    Nearly everything related to presentation on the website is out of our hands -- it's controlled by Future, which has a standardized CMS for most of their sites. AnandTech is one of the exceptions -- transition to our Vanilla CMS has been indefinitely delayed. Anyway, are you saying we have too much text on our front page? The usual complaint is too many ads, which is also out of our hands.

    For articles, we try to mix in a few images and tables with the text every 3-5 paragraphs, but we do tend to get technical and sometimes just a bit long-winded. It's sort of the reputation Tom's has built of the years: go deep. Cheers!
    Not sure about the ads, most websites show so much ads, that its literally impossible to surf a website without an adblocker, especially toms. No offence, I am a tomshardware reader since the dial up era, but the site was a lot nicer back then.

    Regarding the text part, the top part of the landing page looks a bit cluttered. Especially the headings on the right layout. The fonts dont have to be so big. Anybody who cant read smaller than that font will zoom in. But for 99% that is not a problem. Presentation becomes important. The same headings on anandtech are in a big grey box. Looks neat. Even the seperators (the 2 horizontal red lines) between section looks a bit kiddish, Its 2020, you can do much better than that. Then again, opinions are subjective.
    Reply
  • Phaaze88
    vinay2070 said:
    Not sure about the ads, most websites show so much ads, that its literally impossible to surf a website without an adblocker, especially toms. No offence, I am a tomshardware reader since the dial up era, but the site was a lot nicer back then.

    Regarding the text part, the top part of the landing page looks a bit cluttered. Especially the headings on the right layout. The fonts dont have to be so big. Anybody who cant read smaller than that font will zoom in. But for 99% that is not a problem. Presentation becomes important. The same headings on anandtech are in a big grey box. Looks neat. Even the seperators (the 2 horizontal red lines) between section looks a bit kiddish, Its 2020, you can do much better than that. Then again, opinions are subjective.
    I know that the ads are for the benefits of said sites and I don't mind supporting them by turning my blocker off, but some of them are so disruptive to the end user experience, to the point of PRESSURING the user into using adblockers.
    Especially on Youtube, when I'm watching entertainment-type content. Something just happens to get a good laugh out of me, and then - BAM! A Manscaped ad.
    That's so bloody annoying. I miss the days when the ads were just at the beginning and end of the content...
    Reply
  • watzupken
    What I don't understand about this page is when I am browsing on my laptop, whatever video that is playing will follow me wherever I scroll. There is a reason why people scroll away from the video in the first place, and even though it kind of minimized to a small box, it is still very annoying when there isn't a lot of screen estate on a laptop.

    Anyway back to this review, I am not sure why bother to review a RTX 2080 Super now since its been released for a long time. Typically we should expect good cooling with the ROB Strix version, though the price will turn most people away. There are other alternatives that are just as good if not better, instead of paying the Asus tax.
    Reply